openclaw, open-source self-hosted ai assistant
About OpenClaw
Free, open-source personal AI assistant by Peter Steinberger that runs on your machine and performs real tasks autonomously. Talk to it from WhatsApp, Telegram, iMessage, Discord, Slack, or Signal. One-liner install, persistent local memory, ClawHub skills marketplace, sandbox or full system access, and support for Claude, OpenAI, DeepSeek, Qwen, or local LLMs via Ollama. 247K GitHub stars by March 2026; Steinberger joined OpenAI on February 14, 2026 with a non-profit foundation taking project stewardship.
Key Capabilities
One-liner install with full system or sandboxed access, runs on any hardware including old Mac Minis
20+ chat-app integrations: WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack, iMessage, Signal, and more
Persistent memory stored as local Markdown, survives restarts and supports hot-reload editing
ClawHub skills marketplace plus self-writing agent skills for extensible automation
Model-agnostic: Claude, OpenAI, Qwen, DeepSeek, or fully local via Ollama for $0 API cost
Independent of any platform vendor; project stewardship via non-profit foundation since Steinberger joined OpenAI in Feb 2026
Standout Features
Local-First Privacy & Sandbox
Runs entirely on your hardware with optional Docker sandboxing. Data never leaves your device unless you choose a cloud LLM.
20+ Chat-App Integrations
Operates across WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Slack, iMessage, Signal, and 15+ more platforms simultaneously.
ClawHub Skills & Self-Writing Agents
Community marketplace for agent skills, plus agents that write their own skills. From file management to browser automation to multi-agent swarms.
Perfect for
Pricing
How much does OpenClaw cost?
Free (MIT license); you pay only for LLM tokens ($0 with local models, $6-200+/mo with cloud APIs)
Community Buzz
Whats stopping you from building your solo startup? Coding - Claude, Code Editing - Cursor, Frontend - V0, Team - Openclaw. The entire solo founder stack is here.
Alibaba has just released a coding plan with all the best open source models. And you can plug it to Claude Code, OpenClaw, Codex, Cline.
This is one of the cheapest AI coding stacks I've seen. Alibaba Cloud just dropped a coding plan starting at $10/month. It already supports tools like Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw, Cline, and more.
Similar Tools to OpenClaw
Claude Cowork
Anthropic's agentic desktop app for non-technical knowledge workers, released as a research preview in January 2026 with a wider enterprise rollout in February 2026 adding Google Drive, Gmail, Docusign, and FactSet connectors. Give Claude a goal and it works on your computer: opens local files and applications, plans the work, coordinates sub-agents, runs steps in an isolated VM, and delivers a finished deliverable. Sibling product to Claude Code, aimed at marketers, ops, researchers, and founders rather than engineers.
KiloClaw
Fully managed hosting for OpenClaw, the open-source autonomous AI agent. KiloClaw reads your email, manages your calendar, monitors your projects, and talks to you wherever you already are. Each instance runs in a dedicated Firecracker VM with persistent storage, native chat-app integrations, and 500+ models via Kilo Gateway. Setup takes under 60 seconds, no Docker, SSH, or YAML required.
free-claude-code
MIT-licensed local Python gateway that sits in front of coding agents and routes Anthropic-format traffic to free, paid, subscription and local backends. The README claims 50 ToS-friendly providers, 1.3B+ free tokens a month and 10 coding agents (Claude Code, Codex, Pi, OpenCode, Cline, Hermes, DeepSeek Harness, Grok Build, Muse Code, Aider) behind one searchable model catalog, with automatic fallback to the next configured model when a provider fails. It is an independent project, not affiliated with Anthropic: you keep the agent harness, not Claude's weights, and free-tier limits belong to each upstream provider and may change. A GitHub issue titled "Malicious claims about this repo" is a community dispute, not a verified finding, and no privacy or security policy page exists beyond the README.
Apache Maka
Apache-incubating agent workspace where the Desktop app, the TUI and the CLI are thin clients of one Runtime Host, and every model message, tool call, permission decision and termination is written as an append-only RuntimeEvent: the project's own line is "the log is the runtime". You bring the model (a cloud API, a local model or a compatible gateway) and sessions, settings and run records stay on your machine. Its site publishes a nine-harness Terminal-Bench 2.1 table with per-task CSVs rather than a headline claim. Read the status before installing: as of 8 September 2026 Maka has not made an Apache release, the desktop nightlies are unsigned previews not intended for production, and the CLI ships as maka-agent@next on npm (the unrelated maka package is not this project). Its SECURITY.md is unusually direct: the only enforcement boundary against an adversarial LLM is the operating system, and API keys sit in a local plaintext credential file readable only by your OS account.
Void
Discontinued. The repository was archived on 2 June 2026 and the README states Void is deprecated and no longer accepting contributions. It was a VS Code fork that sent model calls straight to your own provider or a local model, and the last builds still run, but no fix or security patch is coming.
Aider
Top-tier command line AI tool. Lets you pair program with LLMs (Claude 3.5, GPT-4o) directly in your git repo. Edits multiple files effectively.
Related Articles
Browse vetted vibe coding agencies for MVP builds, cleanups, and audits.
ready to try openclaw?
go to the official site and judge OpenClaw yourself.
try openclaw now